A recovered journal entry, written on hotel paper as I attended an all-day Anti-Smoking Workshop with an extracurricular group of students.

I forgot to call Preacher on Wednesday. Sigh. This is the first time in 8 years that I've forgotten to place the birthday call. It's not good for me to forget, since I have to pick up the slack for Palaver (who never remembers). And then there's the fact that every time I think about chucking it all and running as far as my car & credit card will carry me, I visualize running away to Edmonton. I kind of need to keep my contacts in that city if I'm to show up 8 1/2 months pregnant with no prospects and no good reason.

Oh well. Maybe I was just being cunning and avoiding the crush of good wishes and congratulations. Yeah, that's it.

"In this world we live in, we sometimes don't give stupidity enough credit."

I'm sitting in a suburban hotel with 4 kids, only one of whom I met before last week. I had some kind of naïve idea that we'd all bond in the car; everyone united around my cool taste in music. Um, no. You'd think that I'd've jettisoned such ridiculous pipe dreams by now... Driving from Hogsboro was an eerie premonition of driving my teenaged child and a bunch of his or her friends to the movies. They laughed & gossiped, they listened to discmans & they more or less ignored me. So I turned on a Smiths CD and sang to myself & the Sprout. Hey, at least I think that my taste in music is cool.

The whole day has a witchy, unreal quality to it. It's not just my first field trip, it's not just the unfamiliar kids, and it's not just driving away from the school instead of going in to suck it up for one more day. I'm not sure what it is, really. I half-expected the meeting room to be filled with friends and relatives - it's a board-approved baby shower! Except that the room was filled with tables and small pads of paper instead of yellow sleepers, and I'm still at an anti-smoking conference with 4 kids whom I barely know.

I'm exhausted - this week has just pounded the snot out of me. On Wednesday I got up extra early so that I could drop off the Purple Lassitude to my parents' house before school. I was late getting into the building, and the chaos of the Literacy Test was intense. By the time everything was sorted out, I had 23 kids writing like lambs - perfect behaviour, the only compensation for the absolute circus of the morning. The afternoon was equal parts amusing and gruelling, kind of like being marched at gunpoint by clowns. Most of my students took the afternoon off, meaning that I had to be rather more creative than usual with my delivery. Two and a half hours of student silliness wore me down to a nub, and then I had a parent-teacher conference. Blech.

Both of my arranged rides forgot about me by the time I'd finished with the parent, and I ended up hitching a ride with the ever-sympathetic Betty. Got to my parents' eventually, only to be greeted by the news that the car wasn't ready. I could go pick it up and do the same extra-early commute the next morning, or I could spend the night at my parents. I opted for the latter. My mom washed my underwear & socks after I went to bed.

So by the time I got home yesterday I'd been away from home for close to 36 hours, I had supervised 2 days of the Literacy Test, I'd worn the same outfit 2 days in a row, I'd survived a punishing department meeting where we actually cared about the topics up for debate, and I was suddenly over $500 in the hole for new tires and an alignment job.

Is there any wonder that today seems surreal?

Booty Call: Day 231 - Length: about 31 cm crown to rump (42.5 cm or 16 1/2 inches head to toe). Weight: about 5 lbs.

5 years ago today: the golden girl